Two suns over Tatooine?

Continuing in the search for a suitable star for a science-fictional planet to call home... It's widely known that many stars are found in pairs, in which one star orbits around the other. The idea of having not one sun, but two, has fascinated many people. But one must tread fairly cautiously if one wants to create such a system.

Follow up:

Planets around a single star can have quite stable orbits. The gravity of the central star dominates the entire system, and the orbits of the planets are almost completely determined by that. The planets may give each other small gravitational "tugs", but those are hardly perceptible. Add a second star, however, and suddenly you have two competing players, whose gravitational pulls will, in most cases, make the orbit of a planet unstable! That's not good at all, from the point of view of sustaining life on that planet. If the planet can swing very close to, or far from, the stars... well, life won't last long there.

There are ways around this, if you're careful. For instance, if both stars are in a very close-in binary, you might just be able to have a planet on a very wide orbit around them both, so that for purposes of gravitational pull on the planet, they act more or less as a single star. (In practice, there will probably still be enough variation in the gravitational pulls to make the planet's orbit unstable.)

Another, and probably better setup, is to have the two stars in very wide orbits around each other, so a planet close in to one star will have a minimum of gravitational hassle from the other star. In this latter case, however, you won't really see "two suns" - the star you're not directly orbiting around will likely appear as a bright, but still point-like, star.